People's understanding and exploration of the ocean can be dated back to the 3rd century BC. Later, pure commercial and expedition voyage, voyage involving scientific meanings and pure scientific investigation based on modern technology follow. Oceanography is an observation-based science and every leap in the process of cognition on the ocean is based on the advent of a new observation method and measuring device. Looking back to the marine observation history, the invention of the acoustic Doppler current profiler enabled people to understand the large-scale circulation structure in the globe; the appearance of the conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) profiler enabled the people to ascertain the large-scale water mass formation and transformation in the entire ocean, the launch of various satellite altimeters enabled the people to make preliminary cognition on meso-scale and small-scale processes in the ocean such as spatial structure and time evolution of meso-scale eddies and internal waves.
Great process has been made in the meso- and large-scale process concerning the research of oceanography but the scientific research of micro-scale has just started. In recently years, the shear, temperature and conductivity probes for high-frequency sampling have been successfully developed, which draws the curtain of the research on ocean micro-scale process. Currently, there are two methods in the measurement of ocean microstructure, namely mooring point measurement method and shipboard vertical profile measurement method. The former only conducts measurement at a specific depth of a fixed position in the ocean and it could contribute to better time-series observation but fails to obtain the characteristics of the vertical structure of the ocean. As for the latter, an oceanographic vessel is used to measure the ocean microstructure from the ocean surface to a specific depth; however, it is impossible to obtain the time variation characteristics of the ocean microstructure and the measurement may be subject to the limitation of some unfavorable factors including ocean conditions and complex site operation, etc. With respect to the research of ocean microstructure, time variation and spatial structure represents two important parameters for describing the characters of the research. Therefore, the ocean micro-scale structure observation device aiming to obtain the changes both in the spatial structure in vertical and time variation is to be urgently developed. In the description or research of ocean microstructure, turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate is an important physical variable. Therefore, the direct and accurate measurement on the turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate is of great significance on the transfer and dissipation of the turbulent energy. In recent years, the shear probe for high-frequency sampling is able to accurately measure the turbulence kinetic energy dissipation rate but its application is based on either mooring point measurement method or shipboard vertical profile measurement method and fails to realize the integration of both two methods. It can be seen that the shear probe for high-frequency sampling plays an important role in breaking through the bottleneck of ocean microstructure observation, making the observation methods and platform innovated and enabling the organic integration of both platforms above.